CVE-2026-112902

This vulnerability is rated as having Important severity because it enables unauthenticated remote attackers to obtain sensitive process memory or terminate worker processes by submitting specially crafted image files. In Red Hat environments, Pillow is commonly deployed in web services and automated pipelines to process and transform user-supplied graphics. Exposure is primarily limited to application workflows that ingest untrusted images and write them out using the TIFF format, where mismatched tag handling leads to out-of-bounds reads. Successful exploitation can defeat address space layout randomization (ASLR) or disrupt image ingestion services through persistent segmentation faults.

To mitigate this vulnerability, apply operational controls within applications utilizing Pillow:

1. Restrict output formats: Configure image-processing workflows to avoid re-encoding or exporting untrusted user-submitted files into the TIFF format.

2. Strip metadata: If converting images to TIFF is required, strip or omit untrusted metadata, such as EXIF data or custom tags, before invoking the image save routine.

3. Process isolation: Isolate image rendering and conversion workloads within sandboxed environments or restricted containers with strict memory boundaries to limit access to sensitive memory and minimize the blast radius of worker crashes.

Caveats: Restricting image export formats or stripping metadata may alter downstream image handling and remove required tag information from generated files.

--- CME Mitigation Guidance (2026-11-04) ---

Disclaimer: The following mitigation solutions are provided as a courtesy, pending the application of an official patch. This content was generated utilizing AI tools in conjunction with data from https://cmetaxonomy.org. Customers are advised to independently evaluate and test these temporary mitigations within their own infrastructure.

The highest-value action is to eliminate the forwarding of unvalidated unknown metadata tags to libtiff during TIFF encoding: upgrade to Pillow 13.0.0+ (or the corresponding fixed Red Hat builds), which stop forwarding unvalidated unknown tags to libtiff when saving TIFF images, closing all 2 injection vectors (crafted TIFF image upload, crafted EXIF metadata in JPEG, PNG, or WebP image files). Until patched, this is a concern on applications and workflows accepting untrusted image uploads and re-saving or converting them to TIFF format, so avoid re-encoding untrusted images into the TIFF format, or strip untrusted EXIF metadata and custom tags prior to invoking TIFF save routines. These controls limit blast radius and contain exploitation, but they do not fix the underlying out-of-bounds read defect — apply the upstream patch to fully remediate.